GFE student Amanda Mixon receives the prestigious AAUW Fellowship!

Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Post Date: April 16, 2019

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Graduate Feminist Emphasis student Amanda Mixon received the prestigious American Association of University Women (AAUW) 2019-2020 Dissertation Fellowship! 

Abstract: Queerer, My God, to Thee: Twentieth-Century White Southern Lesbian Writers & Anti-Racist Praxis frames Lillian Smith, Rita Mae Brown, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, and Dorothy Allison as a distinct political tradition whose concern with how people are trained to inhabit and (re)produce whiteness radically departs from anti-racist political thought and activism among white southern women of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Situating each of these figures within their specific socio-historical contexts, I trace their political thought and activism, as well as their influence on each other, in order to explicate forms of anti-racist praxis and theorizations of white racialization and sexualization. By focusing on the psychosexual development of white southerners within the heterosexual nuclear family, these writer-activists, I argue, collectively thematize whiteness as pathology, suggesting that striving for an anti-racist world requires changing how whiteness is passed down from one generation to the next.



Minnie Bruce Pratt, anti-Klan demonstration, Washington, DC, 1982. Photo: Joan E. Biren